riskable
@riskable@programming.dev
Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast
- Comment on Do I understand the current evolution of AI correctly? 12 hours ago:
I almost forgot: The reason why “business leaders” want to see AI everywhere is because they think it’ll be just like the adoption of every other technology to this point: It gets cheaper over time (not always better, but usually so).
The assumption is that if they “beat their competitors” to be the first ones using AI efficiently, they’ll utterly destroy them (economically; they won’t be able to compete). It’s a very bad assumption.
So far, “Big AI” is getting better but at costs that scale geometrically with the amount of “better”. That is: You can improve reliability (e.g. reduce hallucinations, increase accuracy, improve outputs in various ways, etc) but only by drastically inflating the cost and at reduced speed and efficiency.
We’re starting to learn that LLMs need about two generations of hardware advances before they’re going to be cost efficient for the types of “human productivity enhancement” that business leaders want. It’s only affordable now because “Big AI” is subsidizing the costs, trying to get customers hooked. The assumption being that if they’re hooked on AI, they’ll be able to raise prices to reflect actual costs. Just like the business leaders, this is a very bad assumption.
Instead, what’s going on is that the open weights AI models are starting to get “good enough” for most tasks (that you’d want to use them for, e.g. coding or agentic automation stuff). That means that all the billions and billions being spent by Big AI is just building up debt that will never be repaid and having this side effect of using up all the chip/memory capacity in the entire world.
It’s an absurd situation and the world will eventually look back on this time like we do the dotcom era.
- Comment on Do I understand the current evolution of AI correctly? 12 hours ago:
The S in “agentic” stands for security!
- Comment on Do I understand the current evolution of AI correctly? 12 hours ago:
I don’t know that story, but if the data center isn’t built yet, that’s just the normal water consumption that would be required for any building construction.
Building big buildings uses a lot of water. It’s necessary for dust management, soil compaction, etc. They literally just spray it everywhere during construction and that’s actually very important! LOL.
It always amuses me when I see people complaining about data centers that are still under construction using “millions of gallons” of water. I’m thinking, “yeah dude, that’s how construction works.”
They never complained about the construction water usage of all the other buildings in the area which make the “huge data center” look like a drop in the ocean for that kind of thing.
- Comment on Do I understand the current evolution of AI correctly? 16 hours ago:
The fresh water thing is wrong. The study that came out showing AI using shittons of water was including the cooling pond water at power plants. It was… 76% of the water use? I forget the % but it was so much that it completely changed the statistic from “holy shit” to “oh, who cares, then?”
Also, most of the mega huge data centers under construction are everywhere. Not “villages”. Meta’s big one is actually in the middle of nowhere.
Agentic AI isn’t just “if else” stuff. It’s way TF more complicated than that. It’s so fucking complicated, they’re terrified of implementing it at my work because they fear they won’t be able to understand what went wrong when something inevitably goes wrong (LOL).
The ontology thing isn’t really a thing. That’s just what outsiders are calling some internal programming they’re adding to LLMs so they don’t hallucinate “obvious shit”. The actual issue there is that, yeah: You can feed the LLM output back into itself four fucking times over to double-check it but that uses 4x as many tokens!
The thing you’re missing is that token usage is exploding. It’s like the world of AI has collectively decided that it needs that 4x token usage but they can’t figure out a way to do that economically, so they’re just sort of whistling while looking away from their balance sheets while at the same time getting seemingly endless loads from private equity idiots who think “AGI is just around the corner.”
- Comment on A data center drained 30M gallons of water unnoticed — until residents complained about low water pressure 2 months ago:
For those wondering how TF a data center that is not even online yet could be using so much water:
- Soil compaction
- Dust suppression
That’s it. For the scale of that project, that’s all it would take to use 30 million gallons.
When they’re done, they also need to flush miles of pipes which could also use a few million gallons but I don’t think they’re at that phase yet.
This amount of water would be used no matter what buildings they were constructing in that amount of space. Meaning: This article is pretty misleading clickbait (because a lot of people hate data centers lately, the headline will generate clicks).
The alternative is to have loads of data centers instead of one big one. That’s more expensive, so they build a single big one.
If you don’t like data centers, it makes sense to build a few really, really big ones like this rather than lots of smaller ones. Because data centers are necessary and important aspects of modern living. They’re not going to just go away. There’s nothing that could replace them.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
So their AI prompts are like…
Women: “My boyfriend keeps looking at his phone instead of me!”
Men: “Explain the Bessemer process to me in case I get Isekai’d.”
?
- Comment on SUPERGIRL | Official Trailer 4 months ago:
Hollywood really is out of ideas.
Give more interesting writers and scripts a chance, losers!
No wonder no one wants to go to the movies anymore.
- Comment on Tax the Rich All You Want. It Won't Fix the Deficit. 4 months ago:
Deficit? That is only tangentially related. Tax the rich the most because the can afford to pay the most.
Also, wealth should not grow so much that a few people are worth more than the bottom 2/3rds of the world. Tax them until the situation is drastically better. Then we can talk about maybe cutting down the amount.
- Comment on Burger King will use AI to monitor employee 'friendliness' 5 months ago:
Talk about sending the wrong message! Some of us appreciate depressed, angsty teens behind the counter because it reminds us of our youth!
- Comment on UN approves 40-member scientific panel on the impact of artificial intelligence over US objections 5 months ago:
Of all the things to object to… This?
It’s so silly! No matter what the panel concludes, the current Trump regime will just ignore it anyway. Just like they ignore the IPCC or polling or basic economics.
It’d be like the administration objecting to a panel being formed about vaccines, pollution, corruption, or authoritarianism. Clearly, they don’t care so why bother? It just draws attention to their incompetence.
Just another loud demonstration of their incompetence, actually. Otherwise they wouldn’t have objected.
- Comment on Journalistic Malpractice: No LLM Ever ‘Admits’ To Anything, And Reporting Otherwise Is A Lie 6 months ago:
Good catch!
- Comment on Why College Students Prefer Socialism—and Why They're Wrong 7 months ago:
Article from someone who doesn’t know the difference between communism and socialism (which actually doesn’t have a universally accepted definition).
I’d love to hear this guy’s take on how to deal with Baumol’s Cost Disease:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Capitalism has no solution for it, but socialism does. It’s almost as if capitalism is good for some things and socialism is good for other things! Then there’s democratic socialism which chooses to use both economic systems, choosing the most appropriate one for any given thing.
- Comment on The Official Startup Video For The Steam Machine Has Been Leaked - Steam Deck HQ 7 months ago:
Yet for some reason it still left me kinda hyped 🤷
- Comment on builder.ai has been tricking customers and investors for eight years – selling an advanced code-writing AI that, it turns out, is actually an Indian software farm employing 700 human developers 7 months ago:
Analog intelligence.
- Comment on AI music creates unease as it tops the charts 8 months ago:
In other news, turns out pop music is very formulaic and easy for a machine to generate!
The distance between, “all of this was made on a computer with minimal effort” and, “this music was entirely generated by AI” is very short indeed.
- Comment on JSAUX teases aftermarket mods for Steam Machine 8 months ago:
As long as there’s some kind of power available inside the machine (e.g. an extra SATA power connector) it can just use that and wifi.
I suspect that the Valve engineers weren’t so short sighted though and probably have all the usual headers/connectors inside the thing that a normal PC would have. For example, a USB 3 header (the kind usually used for front-panel USB ports).
If anything, the device probably has at least one extra M.2 connector and a 1x or 4x PCI express connector. With those, anything is possible.
- Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors 9 months ago:
It’s possible that a huge number of sites that are currently free will turn to paywalls but that won’t make the local AI useless. You’ll just give it your login credentials for any sites you want it to search and it’ll do it’s thing (and no, captias don’t work with AI models… They’re only good at stopping basic crawlers).
- Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors 9 months ago:
I’ve been saying this for some time now: AI is going to kill so many business models because it’s really great at creating summaries.
You don’t even need a huge cloud-basrd AI! Local AI—running on your PC—can search the web, summarize the news (and Wikipedia articles), and perform similar tasks without a human ever visiting the site.
It’s like having your own personal secretary that you can tell to go do stuff.
I think it’s going to kill free search engines because it can go do a search on all of them at once in seconds and no human will ever see those ads.
- Comment on Amazon's strict RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document and insiders 11 months ago:
We continue to believe that teams produce the best results when they’re collaborating and inventing in person,
First of all, that’s 100% bullshit.
Secondly, what about individuals‽ Ya know, the people that make up “the team.”
Studies have shown that individuals produce the best results when they’re working alone and not bothered regularly by office bullshit.
…but let’s get more specific, because Amazon is talking about innovation and “inventing”: Study after study has shown that the kind of “group brainstorming” that Amazon is referring to here produces worse results that having individuals work on ideas alone then pooling them together afterwards.
Literally the opposite of what they’re claiming.
Amazon: Believe your own bullshit at your peril. Well, at the loss of tech talent I guess 🤷
- Comment on It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes 11 months ago:
I hate Microsoft and Excel but that date thing is exactly the kind of stuff that AI would be great at.
Just not the kind of AI Microsoft probably plans to put in Excel 🤷
- Comment on Japan's 1st osmotic power plant begins operating in Fukuoka 11 months ago:
Well it’s certainly not sad news!
- Comment on GPT-5 upgrade sparks backlash from ChatGPT Plus users over new usage limits 11 months ago:
Seems a bit early in the game to start nickel and diming their customers. Especially when Claude Pro is cheaper and is actually better in many respects.
Technically, 80 messages every three hours is better than Claude Pro’s ~45 messages in five hours but that’s only during peak times. If you’re mostly using Claude at night you’re basically never going to run out (with casual/human-speed chat usage).
- Comment on Facebook flags Linux topics as 'cybersecurity threats' — posts and users being blocked 1 year ago:
Know Linux? Kindly filter out all job postings from Meta. You know, for failing to meet the Linux community guidelines.
Actually, you should do that anyway but now you have a more practical reason.
- Comment on GPD WIN 4 handheld plans to support Valve's SteamOS in 2025 1 year ago:
They should rename it then! The Steam OS version should be “FTW” 👍
- Comment on Handheld consoles are the industry's next battleground | Opinion 1 year ago:
Well, good/useful AI integration. An AI that makes games infinitely replayable by changing the story, levels, and characters so they’re 100% unique every time? That could be awesome. Oh man I bet that sort of thing would be amazing if done right in a roguelike game!
AI that tries to figure out how to sell you more loot boxes? No thanks!
- Comment on Brits are scrolling away from X and aren't interested in AI 1 year ago:
The way this article reports about these things makes it seem like we should all be disappointed in the British. I mean, we should definitely all be disappointed in the British for sure but not because of their lack of adoption of X and AI! 🤣
- Comment on “Fascists”: Elon Musk responds to proposed fines for disinformation on X 1 year ago:
It’d be one thing if X didn’t actively promote disinformation but they are doing that. They’re picking what and who to promote via their algorithm.
If they had a hands-off approach to free speech (like any given Mastodon instance) I’d agree with you. Since that’s not the case I can’t see how it’s a, “slippery slope”. They’re actively promoting disinformation in order to push a political agenda that actively hurts the Australian people.
It’s basic liability, not really related to freedom of speech. You can say whatever you want but there can also be legal consequences for what you say. It’s always been like that. Even in the US.
- Comment on China is the runaway leader in generative AI patent applications followed by the US, the UN says 2 years ago:
Yet another reason why patents on software shouldn’t exist.
- Comment on Meta’s AI is summarizing some bizarre Facebook comment sections 2 years ago:
My greatest hope for humanity is that AI never cease to be hilarious 😁
- Comment on Valve has little to worry about as new Steam Deck rival arrives 2 years ago:
Unless it runs Linux it doesn’t stand a chance. The moment you decide to sell a handheld gaming console running Windows you doom it to failure. It’s the worst OS possible for that purpose.